Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough tore into Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum on Thursday over their “softball” town hall event with Donald Trump, calling the Fox News anchors “absolute jokes” for “fawning” over the ex-president.
In a transparent counterprogramming move, Trump—who has skipped the GOP debates—held a live Iowa town hall on Fox News at the same time CNN aired its Republican presidential debate between Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis, Trump’s top rivals for the GOP nomination.
The Wednesday night forum also broke Fox’s effective ban on live interviews with Trump, which had been in place since April 2022 amid his bitter feud with the network and Fox’s legal issues over parroting his election lies—which eventually cost Fox $787 million.
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At the top of Thursday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s morning flagship, Scarborough immediately slammed Baier and MacCallum—the faces of Fox News’ “hard news” division—for offering little in the way of pushback while seeming to hold Trump’s hand throughout the event.
“I would call it softball—a softball event. I’ve never seen one as fawning,” Scarborough groused. “I’m not even sure—why did they have two hosts there? They could have just had one, would sit there and smile and say, ‘You’re great.’ Ask another softball question. It’s like tee-ball.”
Scarborough added that even despite favorable conditions for the GOP frontrunner, Trump still swung and missed. The former president also served up an easy talking point for President Joe Biden by boasting that he was responsible for overturning the federal right to abortion. At the same time, Scarborough couldn’t help but take some more swings at his Fox rivals.
“Again, it was such an easy forum. It’s not like he was backed into the corner. He admitted he was the one who terminated Roe v. Wade,” Scarborough declared. “What did the Biden people do last night? They’re just hanging out. They were probably laughing at all the Republican chaos in the debate. Then laughing at the Fox News hosts who were just absolute jokes. It was just an embarrassment.”
Indeed, during the town hall, the ex-president took credit for killing Roe. “I did it. And I’m proud to have done it,” he exclaimed. With the threat to reproductive rights energizing women and liberal voters, leading to recent Democratic victories in local and statewide races, the Biden campaign quickly seized on Trump’s comments.
Continuing his ridicule of the conservative cable giant, Scarborough referenced Fox’s previous backing of DeSantis as a Trump alternative.
“Like, Fox News. ‘Oh, we’re going to be for DeSantis.’ Even DesSantis’ people were like, ‘Seriously, this is a paid advertisement for Donald Trump,’ which it was,” he exclaimed, adding: “Even in the most gentle of circumstances, he made an incredible political mistake, and he knows it this morning.”
On and on it went. At one point, while lamenting how “shocked” he was at the servile attitude of the moderators, Scarborough joked that he was just waiting for them to “bring out some Dreamland ribs” for Trump during the town hall.
“This was like a Glenn Beck survival scene, back when he had a show there,” Scarborough stated. “It was like an advertisement for Donald Trump. And even in that setting, he did this.”
MacCallum and Baier, who worked hard coaxing Trump to agree to the town hall, have taken criticism from other circles over their kid-gloves treatment of Trump on Wednesday night. Baier, for instance, has taken heat over the way he approached Trump’s recent comment about wanting the economy to fail to hurt Biden.
“Baier brought this up but did so in the most feckless way imaginable, prompting Trump: ‘You’re not saying you’re hoping for a crash? Just to be clear.’ Can you imagine if someone did damage control like that for President Joe Biden?” Mediaite’s Colby Hall wrote. “It would lead every Fox News show from Fox & Friends First to Fox News @ Night.”
